Your Ability to Make Things Happen

A key success factor in business is execution. At the end of the day, money is made when business people smartly take carefully laid plans and resources to ‘make it happen’. If you don't make things happen, there is no value delivery to the client, no money received and therefore no business. Execution is where businesses grow or die, you succeed or fail and money is made or lost. Some people are very good at execution while others get lost in strategizing, thinking, planning, designing, making, marketing and such - losing the opportunity to execute for business success.

Great leadership is based on making sound decisions. It’s simply part of the role. But it can also be one of the toughest things to maneuver. When you make a decision, you have to know how long to stay the course and when to reverse direction.

There are obviously simple decisions—the black-and-white variety—that don’t require a great deal of judgment. Those are the decisions they teach you in business school. But in my experience, most of the answers aren’t easy. Decision-making has many shades of gray.

Stanford University professor Chip Heath and his brother, Dan, a senior fellow at Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE), distill decades of academic research into a tool kit for practitioners about decision-making in their book DECISIVE.

Great leaders understand how to balance emotion with reason and make decisions that positively impact themselves, their employees, their customers and stakeholders, and their organizations.
When we think of what makes someone a great leader, one characteristic that comes to mind is decisiveness. We do not envision successful leaders standing around appearing unclear and uncertain. Instead, we view them as people who are able to quickly arrive at their decisions and communicate the goals to others.

The entrepreneur's brain at times can resemble the grand finale of a million-dollar fireworks show. Music's blaring and things are blowing up all over the place. And while it's pretty and entertaining, it's also out of control, hard to follow, and a bit exhausting.

We start every day knowing we’re not going to get it all done. So how we spend our time is a key strategic decision. That’s why it’s a good idea to create a to do list and an ignore list. The hardest attention to focus is our own. But even with those lists, the challenge, as always, is execution. How can you stick to a plan when so many things threaten to derail it? How can you focus on a few important things when so many things require your attention?

It’s estimated that in an average day, you will make somewhere around 35,000 decisions. Many of them are unconscious, but the sheer volume is staggering. What to wear, where to eat, how to get to work, who to call when you get there, all of these little things add up. You could easily argue then, that learning a bit more about the decision making process, and improving your decision making, is a worthy investment.

I’m sure most people are familiar with Pareto’s principle, developed by an Italian economist and most commonly known as the 80/20 Rule. While Pareto originally used the rule noticing that 80% of the wealth was owned by 20% of the population, the rule has applications in almost every area of life. There are many ways you can use this rule. Here’s twenty: